"The Truth about Me," by Louise Marburg

The stories in the collection “The Truth about Me” (WTAW Press, 2017), by Louise Marburg, are a strange and fascinating mixture of odd and sometimes grim and cruel, on the one hand, and matter-of-factly ordinary, on the other. The stories have been called (by blurbers, at least) “audacious” and “sometimes shocking,” as well as “perceptive” and “compassionate.” Making allowances for blurber-talk exaggeration, I find these adjectives appropriate for this collection. The stories usually start off with pedestrian, everyday situations, and then there is always a jolt, a surprise, yet one that is told in an unsurprised tone. The characters are resolutely ordinary, yet somehow encounter, or cause, or tolerate, the non-ordinary. Some themes are grief, addiction, death, abandonment, the pragmatic compromises that spouses and lovers often make, family, and mental illness (including a story about a mass shooting, which by chance I read the day of the most recent tragic school shooting, in Parkland, Florida, this month). This is Marburg’s first book, and I look forward to reading more by her.

"Obama: An Intimate Portrait," by Pete Souza

I have seen some of Pete Souza’s brilliant photos of President Barack Obama in various publications and online, so it has been a treat to peruse those and many more photos collected in his large-scale, beautifully produced and printed volume “Obama: An Intimate Portrait” (Little, Brown, 2017). The book is elsewhere dubbed a “visual biography” of Obama during his years as president. Souza was granted what seems to be complete access to him and his family, his staff, and his meetings with other government officials and international statespeople. Many of the photos are taken in the White House, but others are are from various sites around the country and the world. Souza is highly adept at capturing important and telling moments, whether serious or relaxed and even humorous. Loving moments with his family are particularly touching, as are photos of the President engaging with small children, often in the Oval Office; he leans or kneels down to talk with them, or even lies on the floor to hold an a baby overhead; his sincere affection for these young children is palpable. There are of course also photos of the difficult times when the President and his staff had to deal with crises and tough decisions. The wide variety of photos in a wide variety of settings show the President as the thoughtful, serious, compassionate, caring president and person he was; whether or not one agrees with every decision he made, these characteristics are palpable in the photos. The photographer took nearly two million pictures during the eight years of Obama’s presidency, and over 300 of those are included in this book, along with very light annotation (mostly the pictures speak for themselves). This book, as I turn its pages now in the context of living under the current administration, makes me extremely nostalgic for those eight years.

"Improvement," by Joan Silber

“Improvement” (Counterpoint, 2017) is a novel by Joan Silber, a writer whose fiction I have enjoyed in the past (e.g., "Fools," reviewed here on 6/11/13); I enjoyed this novel as well. Although the book is a novel, it is similar to a series of interrelated stories. It tells the stories of several characters, and of how their actions and decisions affect other characters, other lives, in a sort of ripple effect. The structure of the novel is perhaps a bit too schematic, but it is interesting and even compelling. The characters are very different in race, social class, economic status, and more. Most of them seem to operate in a rather contingent fashion; there is an unsettled nature to their lives. One, Reyna, is in love with a man in prison, yet cannot bring herself to get very involved in an illegal scheme he and his friends carry out. Then she feels she has let him and his friends down, with tragic results. Her aunt Kiki, who spent a good part of her life in Turkey, is in some ways a steadying influence, and also a reminder of the larger world. Other characters come and go; some are able to keep re-inventing themselves, but others get stuck along the way. Although I enjoyed the novel, I probably won’t remember it for very long, perhaps because of its feeling of being slightly scattered, albeit in an organized way.

RIP Ursula Le Guin

I was sad to hear of the death, on Jan. 22, at the age of 88, of Ursula Le Guin. She was a critically acclaimed, prolific, and popular novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist. Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages. She is best known for her science fiction and fantasy works, such as “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Earthsea Trilogy.” For us in the San Francisco Bay Area, she was a “local” writer, a Berkeley native, although she lived in New York and other places, and eventually settled with her husband and children in Portland, Oregon. As readers of this blog may remember, I personally don’t usually enjoy science fiction and fantasy, but because Le Guin’s work in those genres was so literary and, especially, because she was a real feminist and her feminist sensibility pervaded her fiction, I did read and admire some of her work. Le Guin was a great believer in the power of art, especially literature, as a moral force. She will be missed.